Billionaire businessman, Aliko Dangote, has said that the introduction of naira for crude will reduce the demand for foreign exchange by 40 per cent.
He said this on Tuesday as he announced the commencement of the production of petrol at the Dangote refinery located in Lagos.
Speaking on Arise TV, Dangote said, “I will like to salute the people of Nigeria and the government of President Bola Tinubu for creating the environment for us to thrive and also achieve this monumental of giving energy to our people for growth, and prosperity.
“I want to thank President Bola Tinubu for creating this idea of Naira for crude and Naira for the product. Doing that will give a lot of stability to the Naira and remove 40 per cent of the demand for dollars. That’s not just it, there is a lot of round tripping.”
He added that it would become possible to track loaded trucks, hence making it easier to compute the national
consumption.Now that we have this refinery working, it will show the true consumption of Nigeria. We can track each loaded truck and we will try as much as possible to track the loaded ships. Trucks, we can tell you where they are and for some of the products we have, we can tell you the consumption,”he said.
In April, the Federal Government revealed that indigenous refineries can now buy crude oil in naira or dollars.
It also declared that the total crude oil and condensate reserves in Nigeria increased to 37.5 billion barrels as of January 1, 2024, with a life index of 68.01 years.
The Dangote Refinery is able to process 650,000 barrels a day of oil when at full capacity, turning more than half of that into petrol
